Grosse Freiheit, nr. 7, Helmut Kaeutner and Hans Albers
1.
Helmut Kaeutner’s Grosse Freiheit, Nr. 7 (Big Freedom #7), made in 1943-1944, is what the German’s call an “ueberlaufer” film. In this context, the word means “carry-over” with, however, strong implications of treason, betrayal, or outlawry. Films of this sort were produced during the Nazi period, but suppressed and, ultimately, not released until 1949 and thereafter. (Germany’s devastation after World War II was such that there was, often, in many major cities, nowhere to show movies.) Kaeutner’s 1944 movie, Under the Bridges, is also a “carryover” film. Both Grosse Freiheit and Under the Bridges were banned by Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Culture. These films represent a type of “poetic realism” – at least, as proclaimed by international critics when the movies were finally shown, to some acclaim, about five years after they were completed.
Dr. Goebbels ordered Grosse Freiheit suppressed as “insulting to German womanhood” – some of the major female characters are prostitutes. Under the Bridges was shot in Berlin when the city was under, more or less, continuous aerial bombardment and Kaeutner’s cameraman couldn’t help showing some ruins in the background of several scenes – this outraged Goebbels who also banned this picture.
2.
Helmut Kaeutner is one of Germany’s most interesting directors. But his films are almost impossible to see. In Germany, he is a revered artist. But very few of his pictures have been subtitled into English and, therefore, the bulk of his work remains unknown outside of Germany. In the last twenty years, Kaeutner’s obscurity has diminished a little. In 2006, Harvard hosted a small retrospective of the director’s films, including the two “carryover” pictures and several movies made by Kaeutner in the mid-fifties. Cinema Retrovita in Bologna showed about a dozen Kauetner movies in 2017. A few of those movies were highly regarded but the retrospective did nothing much to remedy Kaeutner’s persistent neglect outside of the German-speaking world – in fact, the retrospective, featuring screenings in the Scorsese Sala, was entitled the “Forgotten Films of Helmut Kaeutner”.
Kaeutner was born in Dusseldorf in 1908 – at the start of Grosse Freiheit, the director appears in a cameo role in the movie, bickering in a jocular way about the relative merits of Hamburg (where the movie takes place) and Cologne – at the end of the movie, his character, Karl, has been converted to admiration for Hamburg which he calls “the most beautiful city in Europe.” Kaeutner’s prosperous mercantile family moved to Essen where he attended Gymnasium. The young man, then, traveled to Munich where he studied art, philosophy and theater. (The High School in Essen was a sort of haven for creative young talent and, at that place, Kaeutner studied interior design, set decoration, acting, mime, and dancing.)
In 1931, Kaeutner and three friends developed a cabaret act called “Die vier Nachrichter” – “The Four Newsmen.” (They seem to have performed something like SNL’s “Weekend Update” in the Munich cabaret scene.) The act became famous with skits called “Hier irrt Goethe” – “Here’s where Goethe went wrong”, a spoof on the hagiography celebrating Goethe during the centenary year of the German poet’s death in 1832. The show was popular and toured Germany as well as Austria and Switzerland. This success led Kaeutner and his colleages to embark on a course of political satire which resulted in their being banned from public performance for “lack of reliability and aptitude to the national socialist governance” of the nation. Two of Kauetner’s fellow performers emigrated from Germany. Kaeutner found work in the German theater, primarily in Leipzig, and, also, wrote pop-tunes. (He was musically gifted and, throughout his life, supplemented his other income by writing music; he wrote the lyrics used in the song “La Paloma” in Freiheit.)
In 1939, Kaeutner directed his first feature film, Kitty and the World Conference, a comedy that was promptly banned by Goebbels for it’s allegedly “pro-British tendencies.” Kaeutner made a number of films during the war years, generally avoiding scrutiny by devising the pictures as apolitical comedies or melodramas. At one point, Goebbels demanded that some propaganda be inserted in Kaeutner’s Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska (1941); Kaeutner accommodated the demand but shot the footage with a different lens, used an odd camera angle, and set off the scene with black bars running along the edges of the screen. (Somehow, he got away with this.) Kaeutner’s most renowned Nazi-period film is Romance in a Minor Key, a melancholy love story. Goebbels was suspicious of the film and almost acted to suppress it on the basis of “defeatism”, but, ultimately, the picture was released in 1943. Kaeutner’s last two pictures made under Hitler were shot in difficult conditions and, in any event, suppressed – these are Grosse Freiheit, Nr.7 and Under the Bridges. (Both Romance in a Minor Key and Under the Bridges are highly regarded – indeed, some critics compare Under the Bridges, a film about a rivalry between two Berlin barge-men for a girl’s love, with Jean Vigo’s exceptional L’Atalanta, a movie set in a similar milieu on the Seine River.)
After the War, Kaeutner’s Nazi-era work was deemed irrefutably apolitical and innocuous. He was among the first German directors to be approved for a British and, then, American film license, necessary to make movies under the Occupation. Kauetner formed his own production company and made a number of post-War movies in very difficult conditions – these are so-called Truemmerfilme (“ruins movies”). None of these pictures were succesful, either critically or at the box-office. The wounds were, apparently, too raw.
Kaeutner worked on screenplays with collaborators after disbanding his film company in 1950. (He worked on the screen play for the only film Peter Lorre directed, another estimable picture that no one seems to have seen, Der Verlorene (“The Lost One”).) The general consensus in the early fifties was that Kaeutner was washed-up in the film business. And, indeed, he devoted himself to theatrical productions at that time in Berlin and Bochum.
To everyone’s surprise, Kaeutner reinvigorated his career with a series of critically acclaimed prestige productions made in the mid-fifties. This group of films began with a realistic and mournful war picture, The Last Bridge (1953), followed by a number of big-budget films including most famously The Devil’s General (1954/1955) and The Captain from Kopenick, a comedy released in 1956. (An international co-production between France and Germany from 1956, Monpti, is available on Amazon Prime; I watched the film not expecting much from it and was pleasantly surprised at the movie’s excellence and surprising meta-fictional stance toward its subject matter.) This group of films features internationally prominent stars displayed with high production values – the movies are mostly, like Monpti, international co-productions. Critics claim that these pictures feature “blameless guilt” with respect to the Nazi era – the movies show individuals resisting fascism and, often, paying for their courage with their lives. Kaeutner’s come-back movies are said to be staid, conservative, and, among the least interesting of his pictures.
On the strength of the international acclaim inspired by The Captain from Kopenick, Kaeutner was invited to Hollywood where he entered into a seven-year contract with Universal Studios, obligating him to make one movie a year – he continued to work in Europe as well. Kaeutner’s two American pictures The Stranger in my Arms (1959) and The Restless Years (1958) were critical and box-office failures. Universal assigned the direction of a Western to Kaeutner who regarded this as an insult. He and Universal agreed to part company and Kaeutner, complaining of the lack of artistic freedom in the Hollywood film system, returned to Germany. (Remarkably, Kaeutner found it easier to make movies with less interference in Nazi Germany than in Hollywood – although this maybe isn’t surprising when you think about it.) It’s ironic that his first movie made after coming back to Germany was a “Hun-Western”, Der Schinderhannes (released in the US as Duel in the Forest).
In late 1959 and the early sixties, Kauetner made a number of well-regarded pictures. (He was extraordinarily prolific throughout his life.) A modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, The Rest is Silence is critically acclaimed as are several other pictures from this era, The Red (1962) and the comedy The House in Montevideo(1963). Der Traum von Lieschen Mueller (“the Dream of Lieschen Mueller”), a strange noir musical is also highly regarded by those lucky enough to have seen the movie. Only one of Kaeutner’s films from this period is available in the United States – this is the astonishing Schwartze Kies (Black Gravel). Schwartze Kies is a savagely cynical film noir about corrupt contractors selling building materials (“black gravel”) for use on an American military base. The picture is exceedingly perverse and shows Kaeutner operating at his full power. The movie presages Fassbinder and is as keenly attuned to political and commercial corruption as anything made by the younger director.
The German New Wave swept older directors like Helmut Kaeutner to the side. The fact that he had made successful pictures under Hitler made him suspect with the new generation of directors who included Volker Schloendorrf, Wim Wenders, Fassbinder, and Herzog. Kaeutner was relegated to producing TV shows which he did with his characteristic efficiency and industry until the mid-seventies. He also directed theatrical productions and appeared as a character actor in innumerable TV and movie roles. His performance as Karl May in Hans-Juergen Syberberg’s 1974 film of that title is incandescent, one of the greatest feats of acting in German cinema. (The movie concerns a protracted lawsuit involving plagiarism and defamation between the German popular author of Westerns and his nemesis, a journalist who has accused the old writer of fraud; the picture is possibly Syberberg’s best and most approachable film – it is, I think, a masterpiece; Syberberg’s coup is to cast all of the elderly actors in his film with movie stars who were famous during the Hitler period. The picture is part of Syberberg’s notable trilogy of films on the pathologies in German politics, Ludwig, Requiem for a Mad King, Karl May, and Hitler, a Film from Germany)
Kauetner retired in 1977, moved to a house he owned in Tuscany near Chianti, and died there in 1980.
3.
Hans Albers’ biography is, also, the history of German popular cinema. American critics sometimes say that Hans Albers is the German version of John Wayne. German critics, most notably Olof Moeller, reverse the equation: John Wayne is a pallid imitation of Albers. (Certainly, Albers, who was famous for his singing, was more multi-talented and versatile than the American actor.)
Albers was born in 1891 in the St. Georg neighborhood in Hamburg. As an iconic figure in German film, he remains closely associated with Hamburg, although he lived for most of his live on Lake Stamburg in Bavaria. Before World War One, he studied acting but was drafted, fought on the front lines, and wounded in 1916. After the War, Albers performed in theater in Berlin – he could dance and sing and acted the role of the sophisticated man-about-town in the cabaret scene. In the early twenties, Albers was recruited to act in silent films. He is a ubiquitous presence in German pictures made during the silent era – his biographers think he appeared in more than 100 silent films, generally in supporting actor roles. He starred, however, in Germany’s first talkie, Die Nacht gehoert uns (The Night Belongs to Us) released in 1929. During the period of 1930 to 1960, Albers was Germany’s most popular male movie star – indeed, the only movie star to retain his popularity through, and after, the Nazi period.
In 1930, Albers played the part of Mazeppa, the strong man, in Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) – he plays Lola Lola’s boyfriend who humiliates the doomed Professor Unrath in that melodrama. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Albers was suspect on the basis of his girlfriend and, later, wife, Hansi Burg, a Jewish Austrian actress. Because of his popularity, Dr. Goebbels and his lackeys looked the other way, ignoring the fact that the Reich’s most famous actor was living with a Jewish woman. (At that point, Albers wasn’t yet married to her.) In 1939, the scandal became untenable for the Nazi culture minister and Albers’ wife (they had been secretly married) fled to Switzerland and, later, Great Britain.
Albers didn’t like the Nazis and refused to publicly associate with them. Nonetheless, he appeared in Josef von Baky’s remarkable, if perverse, mega-budget film Muenchhausen – a lavish spectacle meant to rival (and surpass) Hollywood pictures with respect to its sets, costumes, and excellent special effects. (The Nazis were particularly impressed with The Wizard of Oz and wanted to make a fantasy film that rivaled that picture; the German picture is gorgeously shot in the honeyed amber of the Nazi version of technicolor, Agfacolor.) Albers plays the title role in Muenchhausen, released in 1943 and, then, performed in his most famous role in Helmut Kaeutner’s Der Grosse Freiheit, nr. 7, completed in 1944 and but not released in Germany until 1949.
After the war, Hansi Burg returned to Germany, ostentatiously dressed in an English military uniform. She and Albers were reunited and returned to their pre-war home on Lake Stamburg. Albers made dozens of picture in post-war Germany, most of them well-known and popular in West Germany but not distributed in the United States or the English-speaking world. Albers was a victim, to some extent of his fame and, often, played the part of a world-weary singing seaman, the older man who longs for the girl but can’t win her. (Although Albers was famous for appearing as a melancholy sailor with an accordion, his only experience with the sea was a one-day excursion to Helgoland made when he was a young man – he got seasick and didn’t like the water.) After Grosse Freiheit, in most of his films, he sings and a number of the tunes in Albers movies’ were released as recordings and became Schlager (that is, “hits”) on the radio and as LPs in Germany. Albers pop tunes often include Platt-Deutsch idioms and words, a nod to his origins in northern Germany and Hamburg. He continued to act on-stage and in films until three months before his death in July 1960. During the last few years of his life, Albers was drinking heavily (he favored cognac) and he suffered a catastrophic hemorrhage while appearing on stage in May, 1960. He is buried in Hamburg’s famous Ohlsdorf cemetery.
4.
One block off Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, the harbor town’s main drag in its red light district, there is a small square. The place is dirty with paper, mainly flyers advertising topless places and brothels, blowing around among the pigeons strutting about on the stained concrete. A couple of shabby bars with lurid, brightly painted hoardings flank the Platz and there is a four-story structure, a “Sex Hotel” with plywood in all windows overlooking the square. The plywood is painted black but there are red silhouettes of women with outrageously large breasts and tiny wasp-waists displayed on the wood panels. In the center of the Platz, there is a raw-looking bronze statute depicting Hans Albers as a sailor; the figure holds an accordion in one hand that dangles down telescoped so that the bottom-most of the metal folds touches the plinth. Albers stands on a sort of squashed mushroom and the blocky concrete pedestal supporting the statue is densely inscribed with graffiti.
When Angelica and I visited Hans Albers Platz in Hamburg, the Reeperbahn had seen better days. The vulcanized dildos in the window displays looked sun-cured, brittle, and weather-checked. The leather harnesses were decomposing and the pornographic images were bleached and almost unrecognizable. A few plump bar girls had spilled out of the bars and were smoking in alleyways. The tourists looked dispirited and exhausted, marching like zombies down the Reeperbahn and, even, the hustlers seemed unenthusiastic and low energy. A small group of German tourists stood in an orderly semi-circle around a young man, possibly a college student, who was trying out stand-up routines on the guests in his Red Light District walking tour. Apparently, he was pretty funny because his group laughed heartily at his gags. (Of course, I tried to eavesdrop but couldn’t understand a word of his schtick.)
The monument to Hans Albers was made by the neo-Expressionist Joerg Immendorf. The pedestal is rough-hewn and seemed to have slathered in wet clay into which some images and letters have been scratched. There are the words: “Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins...” – that is, “Night on the Reeperbahn at 12:30,” lyrics from a Hans Alber song featured in Der Grosse Freiheit and, later, the performers signature number – a bit like “Thanks for the Memories” as sung by Bob Hope or Sinatra’s “My Way.” A couple of mermaids with big breasts are scratched into the dried clay and there’s a cuneiform figure of a naked hag riding a hapless man.
Immendorf was a native of Dusseldorf and, at some point, the Albers’ statue was kidnapped from the Reeperbahn Platz and installed in that city. (I think it had something to do with a fee dispute.) There was litigation and, although Dusseldorf refused to return the monument to the movie star, another bronze was cast and the replica was returned to Hans Albers Platz.
Immendorf was an exponent of an art movement named Der Neue Wild (New Wild Ones). He lived the part. In 2004, Immendorf was busted with in a Dusseldorf luxury hotel with seven prostitutes and 6.6 grams of cocaine. (It’s reliably reported that four more girls were “on-order” but hadn’t reached the orgy yet.) Immendorf blamed the incident on his obsession with orientalism (naked odalisques, I assume after the manner of Ingres’ “The Women’s Bath”) and a recent diagnosis of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). A year later, another prostitute tried to blackmail the artist, accusing him of orchestrating other orgies. By this point, the cat was out of the bag and, so, Immendorf just turned her over to the police. He died while her trial for extortion was underway.
The tourists bade farewell to the melancholy Albers and walked up the avenue of broken dreams. The guide told more jokes and his guests giggled. At the far end of the boulevard where the street curves around a green park (a colossal statue of Bismarck stands at the crest of the hill), there are two glass buildings designed to look like a couple of dancers and a brand-new opera house where a musical based on the movie Rocky plays six out of seven nights a week (with matinees on the weekends). Tour buses were disgorging showgoers on the sidewalk in front of the theater.
5.
Der Grosse Freiheit (Nr 7) is crisply German-engineered. All of its parts mesh smoothly and the film delivers its meanings in an efficient and effective manner. A system of leit motifs and complex symbols deepens the action and provides resonance to what is really just a conventional musical (a melodrama) involving a love triangle.
The fundamental theme developed in the film is the concept of freedom. What does it mean to be “free”? (The implications of this theme obviously troubled Dr. Goebbels and, as we have seen, the movie wasn’t shown in Germany, although it was exported abroad, while the Nazi regime was in power.) Hanses Kroeger feels that his life on land, as a cabaret performer, has deprived him of his freedom. The film posits the sea as a symbol of freedom and the tawdry cabarets and whorehouses on the Reeperbahn as instances of “human bondage”, that is, the condition of being fettered to the land by desire, family connections, mercantile concerns and the like. Freiheit is misogynistic: women imprison men in torrid domesticity.
The condition of being enslaved is represented by images of robotic diminution. We first see Albers as a automaton programmed to beckon to passersby at the Hippodrom on the alley known as Grosse Freiheit. (It’s the address of this cabaret that provides the film’s title.) Inside the Cabaret, we see the sailing ship, a majestic “tall ship”, the “Padua” confined in a small bottle. In the Hippodrom, artificial white doves, again another simulacrum, hover over the arena where horses trot in tight circles around and around but going nowhere – another symbol for Kroeger’s plight. The white dove (“La Paloma”) is a complex image for both freedom and its opposite – as a winged being, the dove flies aloft and can come and go as it wants, but to sailors the doves also signify the land; when a dove alights on your ship, you know the harbor is nearby. (Notice, the imagery of cages and caged birds, particularly the morose-looking parrot in Kroeger’s apartments.) The harbor is both a place of refuge and confinement. An image encapsulates the central dilemma posed by the movie: Hans Albers was famous for his radiant blue eyes and the lighting in the film is frequently designed to overtly highlight this feature. In one scene, Albers’ character gazes intently at the tiny “Padua” in its bottle and his eyes glint in an eerie way. But immediately behind the transparent rum bottle in which the “Padua” is confined, we see the decolletage of Anita’s bosom – her breasts and the vessel are both within the laser-beam of Albers’ gaze. (Note that Anita’s suite of rooms which look out onto the Hippodrom floor are full of dolls, again signifying the diminished state of men in the brothels and cabarets – Anita is a bit like Circe who turns her admirers into slavish hogs.)
Kaeutner creates images that epitomize the film’s concerns. For instance, Gisa, is first shown to us within an enclosed garden, the hortus conclusus associated with the Virgin Mary in Christian iconography. She is physically confined – that is, a locus of unfreedom – an impression furthered by the Zwiebel (“onion”) dome of the church framing the walled garden. Gisa’s imprisonment in the garden signifies her embattled virginity as well as her social isolation and confinement; she is imprisoned by her bad reputation due to her liaison with Jorg Kroeger, Hannses’ brother. When she is lured from her confinement, we see a group of women walking in mechanical lockstep, marching as it were in a way that surely implicates the militaristic Nazi regime in the culture of conformity that confines her. After she leaves the enclosed garden, with its hothouses (Triebhaeuser – that is, “forcing houses”), a man appears and, as the shot fades out, shuts the gate to the walled garden.
The film’s last 40 minutes is a marvel of construction, cross-cutting with astonishing fluidity between the different erotic triangles that organize the plot. The film has commenced with an implied romantic triangle (that returns in some imagery in Hannse’s dream) – that is, a triangle whose points involve the cabaret owner, Anita, Mrs. Consul, the upscale broad who slums at #7, Grosse Freiheit, and, of course, Kroeger. Mrs. Consul, surrounded by well-dressed admirers, believes Hannes Kroeger’s talents with his “squeeze box” (he also can play jazz trumpet) warrants that he appear at the Hansa Theater and she tempts him to aspire to perform in that venue. (Certainly, the elegant Hansa would be an environment far more confining that the Grosse Freiheit.) As the central romantic triangle in the movie develops – Gisa - Hannes - Willem – this narrative is flanked by other triangles: Anita insinuates herself between Gisa and Hannes and, at the cabaret, the sailor Jens finds himself betrayed by Margot who is now courting another seaman using exactly the same patter that we saw her employ to seduce Jens when he first came ashore. As in Shakespeare, a subplot involving ribald and distinctly blue collar lovers (Jens and the prostitute, Margot) is poised against the main narrative in which the love story, although involving the same fundamental desires and anxieties, proceeds at a high social level. Margot is shown “de-lousing” Jens while his buddy, Flete, mourns the fact that he’s bald and, therefore, can’t receive the same tender ministration that the whore accords to his comrade. In this context, it’s noteworthy that German films, even ones made under Nazi supervision, are considerably more frank than Hollywood pictures of the same vintage – for instance, it’s clear that Willem and Gisa have sex while poor Hannes is waiting in his flat for her to arrive at their betrothal supper. Kaeutner keeps the action moving through the use of diagonal and vertical wipes, a quasi-literary device that punctuates the film’s last third and signifies both continuity of action as well as a shift to a related scene – the effect is quicker and more jaunty than the fade-outs that earlier characterize the movie (for instance, the fade at the end of the sequence at the Haeuptlein produce garden where we first meet Gisa.) With wonderful alacrity, Kaeutner channels the film into two sequences that cap the action and embody the film’s themes: first, everyone converges on the Hippodrom where the combination of combustible jealousies and passions results in a general riot; after the riot, with the main characters wakeful with adrenaline, Hannes slips into an uneasy sleep in which his dream enacts symbolically the various conflicts that he faces. The dream is superfluous – it doesn’t show us anything that we don’t already know. But the imagery is dense and astonishing and establishes the depth of the divisions in Hannes’ soul. The choices that he faces are all difficult.
Kaeutner doesn’t simplify and he doesn’t load the deck. Life presents us with choices but they involve ambiguities and the best decision is by no means clear. Throughout the film, Hannes is confronted with decisions that require him to choose between alternatives defined in terms of constraint and freedom. For instance, he can elect to return to the sea as the pilot of the majestic Padua or purchase a Hafenrundfahrt skiff and lead tourists around Hamburg’s harbor – life at sea is arduous, dangerous, and lonely; but life as a tour boat operator is hobbled by domesticity, the same thing day after day. (Kaeutner complicates the equation by showing that Hannes has a real gift for the improvised comic patter with which these tour-boat operators leaven their tours. We’re shown that he would be a real success in the endeavor.) In effect, Hannes ultimate choice, after Gisa rejects him, is between the sailing ship, the “Padua” and Grosse Freiheit, nr. 7. Anita is willing to accord to Hannes as much freedom as possible, but it will never be enough. Again, these choices are difficult because at the cabaret, Hannes excels at performing for the place’s patrons, to the extent that he is lionized there and, even, appears on a radio show broadcast from the Hippodrom. In some respects, the situation is similar to what we see in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel – at the beginning of the von Sternberg film (in which Hans Albers appeared as a strong man), Professor Unrat is suffocating under the conventions governing his life as a sober, bourgeois instructor at a Gymnasium (High School); this is shown figuratively by the fact that the Professor’s caged canary has died at the outset of the movie. Unrat is enticed into what he thinks is a life of freedom, love, and gaiety represented by the seductress Lola Lola. She frees him and, then, turns him into a clown in her cabaret act so that the Professor is ultimately destroyed. The stakes are not so dire in Grosse Freiheit – Hannes has to chose between a reasonably satisfying and profitable job as a cabaret performer (with an option, perhaps, to appear at the “Hansa”) and the lonely life of mariner on the high seas. The complexity of this decision is made material in the ship-in-the-bottle theme. The ‘Padua’ has been laboriously created as a miniature in rum bottle. This object is beautiful in its own right, a precious artifact that is the result of great craft laboriously applied. At the end of his nightmare, Hannes flails about and knocks the ship-in-the-bottle onto the floor where it is broken. What does this image mean? Has the nightmare somehow liberated the miniature vessel (and also Hannes) or is the freedom resulting in the bottle being broken a sort of liberty that is indistinguishable from vandalism and destruction? Kaeutner leaves the image ambiguous and lets the viewers sort through the various meanings of freedom and constraint proposed by the movie.
Production notes
Grosse Freiheit is shot in Agfacolor, the German cognate to Hollywood technicolor. (Agfa was the name of a German chemical products company.) This color process was devised in the early thirties, primarily for slides. By 1933, the film-stock was commercially available for use in cameras – there are many Hitler-era amateur photographs made in Agfacolor. In 1936, the manufacturer released 16 millimeter movie stock to be developed according the Agfacolor process and experimental footage was developed of the Berlin Olympics in that year; nonetheless, the classic record of the 1936 Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is shot in black and white. (Hitler’s home movies taken in Berchtesgarten and showing the Fuehrer’s mistress, Eva Brann, and his dogs are shot on Agfacolor.) Questions remained, however, as to the utility of the process in the German film industry – the longevity of the film stock and the stability of colors recorded on it remained concerns. Dr. Goebbels was alarmed that American technicolor films, most notably Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz as well as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves would supplant German-made pictures and seize the internal (domestic) market. Accordingly, Goebbels decreed that the formidable German chemistry industry work on the technology project and develop a color process that could successfully compete with American technicolor. In 1939, the film, Women make the best Diplomats, a musical comedy, was shot entirely in Agfacolor. Thereafter, prestige pictures made by German studios used Agfacolor. The most notable example is the 1943 epic Muenchhausen, also starring Joseph Albers (Agfacolor was in love with his radiant blue eyes). Muenchhausen (Josef von Blaky) is an excellent film with many spectacular special effects – Goebbels wanted UFA to produce a fantasy movie to rival Hollywood’s Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad and, in fact, Muenchhausen, a very sophisticated comedy and, in effect, an ingenious parody of Hollywood big-budget films, succeeded in all respects. (The movie features a memorable sequence in which Albers as the titular teller of tall tales flies through the world riding a cannonball, an image later imitated in Colonel Kong’s bucking-bronco ride on the warhead in Dr. Strangelove. Muenchhausen has proven to be very influential; it was remade by Terry Gilliam in 1988 starring Eric Idle and Uma Thurman among others.) Grosse Freiheit is probably the most famous picture made using Agfacolor process. Goebbels ordered that the enormous epic Kolberg, produced in late 1944 for propaganda purposes (military forces needed on Eastern front were actually diverted away from combat to appear in the film’s colossal battle scenes) be shot in Agfacolor – by the time the film was completed, Germany no longer existed and so the film wasn’t shown in the country where it was produced. (After the war, Kolberg was suspect and suppressed by Allied occupying authorities; you can buy DVDs of the movie but you have to purchase them from web-sites with names like Heritage Pictures, apparently neo-Nazi distributors; I own Kolberg which is very interesting if badly misguided film and, therefore, am probably on some FBI list somewhere in that “weaponized” agency.)
Agfacolor produces an effect very distinct from the more highly saturated, “candy” colors characteristic of Hollywood technicolor. Films shot in this process have a yellowish, golden or amber cast and the separation between colors is less pronounced than in Hollywood films of the same era; Agfacolor is excellent for simulating the somewhat hazy aspects of northern European light. It seems more “poetic” than technicolor. However, the process was tainted by its association with Nazi films and, after the war, Agfacolor was regarded as obsolete. Nonetheless, the color process survived in Soviet Russia. Russian forces looted enormous quantities of Agfacolor film stock from Berlin’s UFA studios at Babelsberg and seized proprietary trade secrets as to the film’s chemistry. In the Soviet Union, Agfacolor was called Sovcolor and it was used in many important Soviet era films, most notably Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1965-1967), a movie notable for its warm colors; color sequences in some of Tarkovsky’s pictures including Andrei Rublev are shot in Sovcolor.
Grosse Freiheit takes place in a world in which there is neither war, nor the rumor of war. But, of course, this was not the case during the film’s production. Shooting on the picture began in May 1943 in Hamburg (on location) and Neubabelsberg’s UFA studios in Berlin. Hamburg was under almost continuous air assault by Allied bombers and shooting in the city was repeated interrupted by bombing raids. Hamburg’s famous harbor was filled with submarines and war ships and the area on the waterfront where tens of thousands of shipyard workers lived was repeatedly bombed. In the scene in which Hannes leads a tour of the harbor, an iconic sequence for Germans, the shots had to be carefully edited and framed to avoid showing battleships docked along the Elbe waterfront.
Similarly, production in Berlin (Neubabelsberg) was repeatedly interrupted by bombing raids on that city. Then, in the last week of July 1943, the Allies mounted Operation Gommorah, a sequence of air raids on civilian targets in Hamburg in which tons of magnesium thermite bombs were dropped on the city, mostly in the residential areas around the harbor. This was a war crime with the intent of murdering civilians and explicitly designed to cause a fire-storm. The air attack was successful with the result that 37,000 civilians were burned to death (less than half of the bodies could be identified). Hamburg, more or less, ceased to exist and, of course, there was no longer any waterfront to use as a location for the film. Terra, the film’s production company, moved the picture’s shooting to Prague’s Barrandov Studios where the movie was completed by November 1943.
When I was in Hamburg in 2022, I spoke with an old man who had survived Operation Gomorrah. He told me with some bitterness that all of the Nazi brass and government officials lived in luxurious leafy neighborhoods near the Jungfernsteg and lakes (the Binnenalster and Kleinalster) in that part of the city. (Hamburg looks a bit like Minneapolis when viewed from Lake of the Isles or Lake Calhoun.) Very few bombs were dropped on the Nazi officials and their homes. Rather, the vast majority of the bombs unleashed on the City were dropped on the waterfront worker housing, killing thousands of harbor workers and their families, many of whom were crypto-Communists.
The Harbor
Harbor’s are intrinsically poetic. Light reflects off water and mists adorn the harbor’s lagoons and piers. As shown in Grosse Freiheit, colossal hoists and derricks rise above the channels where sea-going vessels are moored. Along the waterfront, there are dives and dancehalls and brothels. Harbors are characterized by sexual license – prostitutes compete to drain the wallets of sailors on shore-leave. I recall seeing Soviet sailors in Duluth around 1980 propositioning Ojibway whores. All kinds of people mingle in the pursuit of pleasure.
Although set along the Seine waterfront in France, the paradigm harbor film is Jean Vigo’s poetic masterpiece L’Atalanta (1934) in which a young couple honeymoons with near disastrous consequences on a barge plying the river. (A scene in which Michel Simon as the captain shows artifacts of his ocean travels to the young bride is imitated in the scene in Grosse Freiheit in which Hannses displays his seafaring souvenirs to Gisa and, in fact, gives her a coral necklace.) Kaeutner’s Under the Bridges (1942) shot in Berlin recapitulates the imagery and themes in L’Atalanta. After the war, a number of films were set in harbors, most notably Clouzot’s Quai des Orfevres (1947), Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), and, even, more memorably the 1949 Panic in the Streets in which Jack Palance dies when a rat-guard keeps him from climbing onto a ship moored in New Orleans harbor – Palance’s character is carrying the bubonic plague. The vein of “poetic realism” mined by Kaeutner in Freiheit is exploited again in Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre (2011).
The one-hit wonder, Looking Glass’ pop song 1972 “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” is another noteworthy example of the genre. Brandy is a bar-maid in a “port in a western town” who makes her living “layin’ whisky down” for sailors at the dive where she works – as to the lonely sailors, the song tells us “the harbor was (their) home.” A seaman falls in love with Brandy but can’t commit to the relationship – “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you will be / But my life, my love and my lady is the sea.” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” (poem published in 1966, released as a song in 1967) is set in the harbor in Montreal; the song’s heroine “take you down/ to her place by the river” where she feeds you “tea and oranges/ come all the way from China” and touches “your perfect body with her mind.”
Annotations
Kasimir – ?
Black water fever – a serious complication of a malarial infection resulting in rapid and catastrophic destruction of red blood cells. Don Adams, the star of Get Smart! almost died from this in World War II after he was wounded on Guadacanal.
Wer wagt - gewinnt – the game in the shop below Kroeger’s rooms. “He who wagers - wins” or “If you dare, you win.” (Qui audit adipscitur) – translated in the film “As nothing ventured, nothing gained” This is a popular military motto but here the name of some kind of gambling (slot) machine. Willem is said to not be able to pass a gambling machine without paying it. In the scene at Sagebiels, Willem puts a coin in a mechanical hen who lays an egg as a souvenir for Gisa.
Busheramp – a kind of woolen fisherman’s coat. The word is platt-Deutsch dialect from the Finkenwerder neighborhood of Hamburg. This was an area on the Elbe’s south shore where fishermen and their families lived. (The point in the film is that Hamburg argot is a language that even other Germans don’t always understand – an example is the greeting “Moin” used in Hamburg but nowhere else in Germany; it means something like “g’d day.)
Hippodrom – A large cabaret-style beer garden featuring live horses, an arena, with seats for 600. The actual Hippodrom was at 10/12 Grosse Freiheit. The Hippodrom at this address was opened in 1929. It followed a previous Hippodrom earlier located farther down the street and opened in 1911. Of course, the place was bombed to ashes in 1943, but rebuilt and operated until the early seventies. Not to be confused with the Hippodrom at 136 Reeperbahn, named one of Hamburg’s top ten night clubs in 1960 and frequented by the Beatles.
Hansa – a well-known Variete theater in the St. Georg district in Hamburg. “Variete” means “music-hall” or “vaudeville” – it’s a very nice venue but not pretentious. However, it’s upscale compared with the more tawdry Hippodrom. “Hansa” refers to Hamburg’s status as a member of Hanseatic League of trading cities on the North and Baltic Seas.
Padua – the “Padua” was a sailing ship (four-master) built to haul freight in 1926 and operated by the Flying P Line in Hamburg. (All the ships in the Flying P Line have names beginnng with a “p”; they were part of F. Laeisz fleet of ships that were largely involved in the transport of nitrates from Chile to Hamburg – that is, they were cargo ships for the trade in guano-derived fertilizers. Laeisz son’s wife was nicknamed “Pudel” (poodle) and, in her honor, all the ships were named by “p” words.) The Padua was one of the last of its kind but famed for its speed – it made a 67 day transit from Port Lincoln (Australia) to Hamburg in 1933 and 1934, an exploit mentioned in the film. The vessel was featured in a number of movies made in Germany between 1936 and 1944. The Russians captured the vessel in 1945 and sailed it to Riga in Estonia where it was renamed the Kruzenshtern. The ship’s home harbor today is Tallinn, Estonia. The ship became famous again in 1972 when it replicated Columbus’ voyage to America, recording an average speed of 17.2 knots throughout the voyage.
Sagebiels in Blankenese – A big and famous dance hall located in Hamburg in the Blankenese neighborhood. The dance hall and restaurant was founded in 1868, occupying a post office building with a 120 foot tower affording a view over the harbor. At least as of 2020, the place was still open.
La Paloma (the dove) – Although usually considered a folksong, La Paloma was written by the Spanish composer Sebastian de Yradier in 1863 and premiered at the National Theater of Mexico for the Austrian prince Maximilian I. There is a legend that Maximilian I asked someone to sing La Paloma for him when he was awaiting execution by firing squad when his Mexican regime collapsed. (In fact, the song was played when his casket was marched to his grave in Miramare near Trieste. To this day, the song may not be played on any ships in the Austrian fleet so as not to dishonor the martyred monarch.) The song is well known internationally. It afforded the basis for a 1933 German movie La Paloma, a song of cameraderie and has been performed by innumerable artists including Elvis Presley in a duet with Connie Francis. Hans Albers’ version in Grosse Freiheit was an enormous hit in Germany and remains a very popular version. (The director Helmut Kaeutner translated and revised the words for the movie). The importance of the song to Hamburg can be measured by the fact that the tune was sung by massed choirs comprising 86,000 singers (the biggest sing-a-long in history according the Guinness Book of records) – this was on the occasion of the celebration of 815th anniversary of the founding of Hamburg Harbor.
Kaiserspeicher – this is the “Kaiser’s warehouse,” located on prominent promontory where the Elbe divides and described by Hannes during his Elbe Harbor Rundfahrt tour. The area to the west of the Kaiserspeicher is dominated by many hundreds of warehouses built in the 1880's, large and impressive structures designed to store freight shipped to the harbor. Hamburg had been a “free city”, governing itself and not under the control of the German State until Bismarck unified the country. Hamburg was opposed to federal intervention in its affairs and, so, a compromise was negotiated: Hamburg would accede to federal (Prussian) control but, in exchange, the government would not levy taxes on goods stored in the harbor’s warehouses. This dispensation led to the construction of an enormous “city” of warehouses in the canals near the Kaiserspeicher. (For some reason, the warehouses were not regarded as a target worthy of bombing – I suppose this is largely because they contained tea and ivory and other luxury goods from the Far East. But the warehouse area survived Operation Gomorrha intact and is now UNESCO protected.) The Kaiserspeicher, an iconic Hamburg landmark, was damaged by some stray bombs but remained functional until 1963 when the structure was demolished. It was replaced by a imposing, if ugly, warehouse (Kaispeicher A), a huge cube of masonry that was, in turn, demolished in 2007 to be replaced by the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, a combination of condominiums, luxury hotel, and lavish performance spaces for the Hamburg Philharmonic – this structure, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, with its wave-shaped roof is now the symbol for Hamburg and contains the longest escalator in the world.
Dr. Oetker’s Powder – Dr. Oetker was a German pharmacist who perfected baking powder and ingredients for pudding in the late 19th century. He lived until the Nazi period and his firm was awarded medals for exemplary war production. (He was also an honorary SS officer.) His company, which still exists, profited from the “Arynizing” of Jewish competitor firms, but Oetker didn’t use forced labor in his factories. A government-sponsored report arising from a 2007 - 2011 investigation of the Company’s Nazi history has been published – with true Teutonic industry, no stone seems to have been left unturned; the report is published as a 672 page book. In the film, Hannses’ spiel suggests that, perhaps, munitions are stored in the warehouse – he talks about giving the “powder’ warehouse a wide-berth.
Blohm & Voss – A Hamburg ship-building firm, now known as Blohm + Voss, founded in 1877. It specialized in steel-hulled ships. (In the film, there is an implied contrast between the wooden four-master, the “Padua” associated with Hanses and the more prosaic ocean vessels built where Willem works.) The firm used concentration camp labor in World War II; a report prepared by Nazi authorities says that Blohm & Voss productivity was higher because of “longer hours of work and less absenteeism.” The shipyard built the German destroyer, the “Bismarck”sunk off the coast of Argentina during the War. The enterprise was always heavily unionized by largely Leftist workers and there is a whiff of this in the laborer’s song that Hanses mentions during the harbor tour and that people on-board sing.
Scheitball – Hamburg pronunciation with “slushy” z sounds for “Zeitball”, that is “time ball”, the mechanism showing the time and tide atop the Kaiserspeicher.
Lombard Bridge – this bridge, built in 1865 is 67 meters long and separates spans the channel linking the Inner and Outer Alstersee (two lakes near downtown Hamburg). It provides a famous vantage on the city and is a popular place for taking photographs. Before World War Two, Hamburg was a well-established tourist destination – it is Germany’s second largest city and the third largest harbor in the world, although Hamburg is 100 meters from the North Sea.
Muss i’ denn – the jaunty tune played on accordion when Hannses, Jens, and Flete return to the Padua at the end of the film is a German folk song first written down in 1827 known by its opening phrase Muss i’ denn (“Must I then – “). The song may be familiar to American viewers in its Elvis Presley version called “Wooden Heart” – Elvis sings the song in GI Blues (1960) when attending a marionette puppet-show along the Rhine River near the Army base where he is stationed. He sings in English and the girl that he is courting sings in German along with the families watching the puppet show. The lyrics are “Must I then, Must I then, from the village now depart, and you, my dear, remain behind. When I return, when I return to the village when I come, to you I will return...” The song’s words are in Schwabian dialect. The song concerns a journeyman about to embark on his Wanderjahre to perfect his craft. German audiences would understand that the song was a popular capstan shanty in the German navy (and merchant marine) and, in quick march version, played by the Prussian military. The song is also sung by excursion groups including tourists embarking on harbor tours. (When I was in Hamburg, the Germans drank beer and sang while waiting for the boat tour to get underway.) A lot of artists have covered the song; Presley’s version, released in March 1961 was a big hit, topping the Billboard 100. Marlene Dietrich sang the song in her cabaret act and there’s a famous version by the Greek singer (and politician) Nana Mouskouri.
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